Advertisement
Guest Essay
Dec. 16, 2025, 1:00 a.m. ET
Credit...Jan Staiger for The New York Times
Anton Jäger
Mr. Jäger is a contributing Opinion writer and a lecturer in politics at Oxford University. He wrote from Brussels.
Among contemporary European writers, the novelist Michel Houellebecq is not known for his optimism. In his oeuvre spanning three decades, a leitmotif has been the inexorability of human decline, from the quality of internet pornography to European civilization itself. “France has given up on progress,” he wrote in 2014. “We are all not only tourists in our own country, but als…
Advertisement
Guest Essay
Dec. 16, 2025, 1:00 a.m. ET
Credit...Jan Staiger for The New York Times
Anton Jäger
Mr. Jäger is a contributing Opinion writer and a lecturer in politics at Oxford University. He wrote from Brussels.
Among contemporary European writers, the novelist Michel Houellebecq is not known for his optimism. In his oeuvre spanning three decades, a leitmotif has been the inexorability of human decline, from the quality of internet pornography to European civilization itself. “France has given up on progress,” he wrote in 2014. “We are all not only tourists in our own country, but also willing participants in tourism.”
Today, Mr. Houellebecq’s comments sound darkly prophetic. Economic growth across the continent, long anemic, has dwindled toward nought, with even Germany’s industrial behemoth slumping. Dynamism has disappeared, replaced by painful dependencies: Europe’s technology comes from America, its critical minerals from China. The continent’s transformation into an arid playpen for tourists, with its economies geared to serve the visitors, is no longer the stuff of dyspeptic speculation.
It is important not to mischaracterize this development. Complaints about the European Union’s failure to produce its own Silicon Valley and comparisons of gross domestic product with a country of over a billion people are not fair proofs of decline. Yet it is undeniable that Europe has been “provincialized,” as the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer once termed it. The negotiations to end the war in Ukraine show that the bloc has been steadily reduced to a second-rate participant in world affairs. In President Trump’s eyes, it is “decaying” and at risk of “civilizational erasure.”
All of this sounds menacing enough to Europeans. Yet perhaps demotion need not be traumatic. Rather, a reckoning with European decline — cultural, political and, above all, economic — could give rise to a healthily modest approach to the present. After a century in which Europe was in charge, with highly ambiguous results, it might even free Europeans of the burdening neurosis of mastery.
At least Brussels no longer suffers from denial; across the spectrum, there’s an awareness that the continent is falling behind. A paradigmatic acknowledgment came last year from the former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi. In a quietly blistering report, Mr. Draghi — widely credited for saving the euro after the financial crisis — enumerated the woes of the European economy, from lack of so-called competitiveness to lagging productivity.
Yet many of the remedies in circulation today are likely to aggravate the disease they purport to cure. The far right offers a familiar prescription: a racial cordon around the continent. Europe’s center, in turn, vaguely gestures at a strategy of renewal through remilitarization and technological advances. The left, for its part, either rails against European overreach or welcomes the continent’s retreat. What is needed is a new “politics of decline,” to borrow a phrase from the historian Eric Hobsbawm, one that looks both inward and outward.
Internally, it requires a break with the austerity fetish that has gripped European policymakers since the 1990s. It is with good reason that the economic historian Adam Tooze has castigated E.U. technocrats as “the Taliban of neoliberalism” for their intransigent attachment to market principles in an age that has declared them obsolete. Jettisoning this dogma is crucial; loosening the fiscal rules for member states would facilitate economic catch-up, on the back of a serious strategy of public investment.
On the political front, that would mean conscious centralization and pooling of sovereignty. This would be a major break from business as usual: Fragmentation has long held sway in Europe, stymying the development of genuinely continental policy. Bringing together countries in common endeavor would be paramount, with the proviso of democratic accountability that European institutions have generally scanted. After all, it is unlikely that the entities that would be tasked with Europe’s relaunch could do so without public support.
Externally, there would need to be an ambitious rethinking of foreign policy priorities. In the past decade, the hope that the European Union could win some measure of military or financial independence from America has proved illusory. Instead, the continent has slid into ever deeper dependence on the United States. Yet such a drift will accelerate rather than halt the decline E.U. leaders bemoan; bulk buying American weapons and energy, for instance, will not make European industry world leading again.
If Europe is to reinvent itself, it must think in more heterodox ways. Mostly, it will have to contemplate something considered beyond the pale in Brussels: critical integration with China. “Critical” is meant in both senses of the term. On the one hand, such engagement is vitally necessary for the fight against climate change, an effort now mostly led by China. Yet it should also be conditional, involving neither submission to Beijing nor blindness toward its grim record on trade or labor rights. Export controls, where necessary, can go together with cooperation.
Europe should pay heed to Britain, an exemplar of decline in the 20th century. In the postwar world, as its empire was crumbling, the country saw two paths in front of it. It could serve as a sort of butler to the United States, fastening its economy and foreign policy to American imperatives. Or it could become a kind of greater Sweden, retaining its industrial base, welfare state and relative diplomatic autonomy. Eventually, after a tussle, Britain opted for the first route, forgoing national independence for the special relationship.
Europe need not become a supersize version of Britain. No longer in the driver’s seat of history, it can shed its damaging delusions of grandeur. On geopolitics and climate mitigation, it can meet its targets even if it no longer gets to be the star player. That will require downsizing some expectations: The aim should be what British soccer fans call midtable stability, rather than league leadership.
This will be a bitter pill to swallow, particularly for the continent’s elite. Some may prefer the seductions of apocalypticism to realism, not least Mr. Houellebecq. In his 2010 novel, “The Map and the Territory,” he grimly presaged a Europe where “the triumph of vegetation is total” and the continent’s factories are devoured by the wilderness. In a striking echo, Josep Borrell Fontelles, a former vice president of the European Commission, has described Europe as a “garden” surrounded by a hostile “jungle.”
The continent’s center and far right, despite their differences, clearly agree on some essentials. Yet that Europe should become either a wasteland or a gated community is not divinely decreed. Cut down to size, Europe may find that a pleasant public allotment in the suburbs of the new global order might be more than enough.
Anton Jäger is a contributing Opinion writer. He is a lecturer in politics at Oxford University and the author of the forthcoming book “Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
Advertisement